Running for Home - 25. November 10, 2021

November 10 2021

Xi’an asked me to help her improve the teaching resource library today. I’m not sure why she asked me, considering I only started teaching two months ago and I have no formal training beyond the Journalism degree I stumbled through while Dom was locked up. I wasn’t even asked to be a teaching assistant for any of the freshman or sophomore classes that I aced because they had a surplus of graduate students for that job. That was part of the reason my accounts started to run dry when they did. I blew a shitload of money going to UCLA and was too dumb to work more hours part-time because I was trying to fall back on my writing for cash and keep getting my name out there to advance my career. I thought my cash flow would stabilize after I finished and had more time to write and more opportunities with a bona fide degree in my hands. I was producing some Grade A shit, after all.

Xi’an told me that for now it was more about pulling together materials like textbooks that they could use. Apparently she has some connections and can get review copies of textbooks either for free or on the cheap. I haven’t said yes yet. I mean, I don’t know when I’d find the time to do this on top of everything else. She says it doesn’t need to be a priority, but she’d like to accumulate at least a few things before the year is up. In case I don’t like it here. In case I decide to call it quits.

I wasn’t able to say anything once she laid that out, the quitting part. I haven’t even thought about what I’m going to do after May, not in a long time. I’ve been too wrapped up in what’s been happening day to day. Suddenly I was wondering about where I’d be if I remained in L.A. after Dom and I broke up. Or, where would I be if I’d finally moved somewhere else I’d wanted to live, like Portland or Seattle. Would I be farther along writing one of the many novels I’d started but never came even close to finishing? Would I have been captured by a new idea and been able to sell it to my old publisher?

The answer is probably not. I’m not stupid. Without the distraction and necessity to get shit done every day I’ve worked here at the School, I probably would have just been wallowing in self-pity for months. By the time I’d have got back on my feet, this lawsuit would probably have been hitting me in the face and I’d be completely screwed. Or, maybe not. I probably wouldn’t have had any money left to pay out. Maybe the lawsuit would never have happened, and instead I’d be caught up in an abusive gaslighting cycle with Dom, like the one JP described going through. I thought about what I might have done, with Dom crawling back to me and pretending that he could do better and we could make things right. I don’t know for sure if I would have let him, but at the same time I’m pathetic enough that I probably would have fallen for the trap, over and over.

You know, there’s part of me that wonders if that’s what happened, what led up to this lawsuit. Dom tried to come back to me, only to find me gone. Then he searched for me and somehow overcame the efforts I’d made to leave as little a trail as possible. I still wonder how he found out where I am.

The School website. Shit, that had to be it. Emma or Sean probably put up a profile of me, or made some welcoming announcement on there. It probably would have come up in an internet search fairly easily. I never explicitly told them I wanted my presence here to be hush-hush, so this is 100% my own fault. Fuck. I can see his reaction now, realizing that I was back here. Back at Xavier’s. Back with our perennial foes from the Brotherhood days. Back with people I’d claimed to hate with my entire being. I wonder if that alone was enough to make him want to hurt me, to hurt me even more than he’d already done. I wonder if, realizing I would now have money again, he could hurt me without having to deal with me one-on-one and he could still get what he wanted anyway – a free ride.

I feel sick.